Positive personal identification comprises a long-standing area of endeavor. For example, as part of completing numerous official transactions, an individual may be required to produce an item of personal identification such as a government or enterprise-issued card or badge that includes information about the individual (such as their name) and/or their likeness. Such actions often unfortunately add both time and corresponding activities to the transaction itself, thereby increasing the need for the resources (and often, particularly, human resources) that are required to effect the identification process while also often introducing delay and inconvenience for the individual or individuals who are being identified.
Notwithstanding such inconvenience, costs, and required logistical support, the underlying purpose of such identification remains important. In fact, a general trend seems to be an overall increase in the desire to expand the number of instances when personal identification may be appropriate and/or to increase the depth and quality of personal identification activities when and as they are conducted.
Numerous mechanisms and attributes are known to facilitate identifying a given individual as being a particular known person. Fingerprints (and other external asperity pattern-based indicia), retinal and/or iris patterns, gait analysis, voice recognition, DNA records and other biological/physical indicia have all been proposed for such purposes along with many other biometrics. Depending upon the context, many of these approaches serve well to permit accurate identification of a given individual.
There are some settings, however, and/or some circumstances, when personal identification based upon such methods are less satisfactory as such techniques are either simply not available or are ineffective for one reason or another. In general, such techniques, including face recognition systems often only perform acceptably in relatively restricted application domains. As but one simple example to illustrate this point, numerous individuals must be quickly processed through security areas of an airport. Typical prior art techniques such as those noted above either tend to be unduly burdensome (with respect to cost and/or application) and/or are unduly subject to fraudulent avoidance and/or are just otherwise unreliable. As a result, for example, a known fugitive can potentially, with relative ease, present themselves as being a person of a different identity and avoid being correlated with their true identity.
Skilled artisans will appreciate that elements in the figures are illustrated for simplicity and clarity and have not necessarily been drawn to scale. For example, the dimensions of some of the elements in the figures may be exaggerated relative to other elements to help to improve understanding of various embodiments of the present invention. Also, common but well-understood elements that are useful or necessary in a commercially feasible embodiment are typically not depicted in order to facilitate a less obstructed view of these various embodiments of the present invention.